This month sees me feeling a little pride. It is twelve months since I changed my job description to ‘freelance writer’. As regular readers will know, I am genuinely preoccupied by elements of children’s experience as a writing topic. I now make a modest sum each month producing hopefully well-informed content on parenting, childcare and primary education. This means I read a lot of stuff about British kids. It is rarely cheery or uplifting. More often it is a depressing catalogue of how much we are getting wrong. So besides the pride, I’m feeling a wee bit despairing about what follows:
- UNICEF has carried out extensive comparative research into the childhoods of thousands of children across the developed and developing world. They find UK children living unhappy lives, trapped in an over-materialistic culture and craving quality time with their families.
- The OECD collates statistics about the educational attainment of children and young adults around the globe. We are persistently middling in the tables. This doesn’t necessarily matter, in the sense that their is always a story behind the stats. What is a problem is our government’s response to it.
- The Cambridge Primary Review, a meta study that collated the research findings of over 4000 studies from around the world, reported in 2009. In essence, it concluded that the children of this fair nation enter formal education at far too young an age, and that some suffer negative consequences to their neuro-psychological development as a result.
- The NSPCC has report just this week that cuts to , and shortcomings in our social services are costing our most vulnerable children very dearly. To quote from their report directly; ‘One child dies at the hands of another person every week. Levels of child neglect have barely shifted [in 30 years]. As many as one child in six is exposed to violence in the home. In this social media age children face new threats of online grooming and cyber bullying. Perhaps most strikingly, more children than ever before are expressing their own anguish and distress through inflicting pain on themselves by self-harming.’
- Young MINDs have established that nearly 80,000 children and young people suffer from severe depression, and over 8,000 children aged under 10 years old suffer from severe depression.
- The Sutton Trust carries out research into educational attainment and social mobility. They have established that by the age of 5 there is a 19 month gap between the most advantaged and most disadvantaged children in our society.
- The Child Poverty Action Group look at social mobility from a slightly different perspective. They know that there are 3.5 million children living in poverty in the UK today. That’s 27 per cent of children, or more than one in four. There are even more serious concentrations of child poverty at a local level: in 100 local wards, for example, between 50 and 70 per cent of children are growing up in poverty.
- A fine group of academics and practitioners wrote to The Telegraph last autumn deeply concerned about overtly formal expectations of our primary schooling system. They are dismissed by the DfE as a ‘Marxist Blob’.
- Back in 2006 another fine group of academics wrote to The Telegraph asking for government to halt what they described as ‘the erosion of childhood’. They were particularly concerned about our culture of materialism and over-exposure to screen media.
- Project Wild Thing’s David Bond has found that children’s roaming area has decreased by 90% in two generations. He believes our children are suffering from nature deficit disorder, and that screen time is utterly out of control.
There are days when I wonder what a true definition of a civilised society could possibly be, if this is the best we can manage for our children. There is no correlation, as far as I can tell, between the challenges that our children and young people face, (as evidenced by this startling variety of heavyweight reports), and the supposed action taken by central or local government. The response of policy makers is entirely disproportionate; researchers describe a metaphoric sinking ship, and the politicians filibuster and tinker, stuffing the gaping hole in the bowels of the vessel with tissue paper and overlaying with sticky tape.
They think schools can solve a nation’s social ills. They think the way to narrow the gap is to insist on 2 year olds sitting down and learning to count. They exponentially raise the cost of living in social housing, by shifting the tax goalposts, and then wonder why food bank use is increasing at a similar rate. They scratch away at the professional pride of teachers, nurses, social workers, and others, and then wonder why there is no-one left to help children and their families when crisis hits. Genuinely sick and disabled people are deprived of support on the judgement of an outsourced agency who cannot do their job properly, and are wasting public funds; they allow this to take place.They strip the heart out of our of the welfare state, while at the same time failing to do anything about creating an economy that can sustain a living wage. Beveridge and Bevan must be looking down, feeling rather confused.
There are things I truly love about being British. We have great comedy, fabulous musical heritage, and are generally liberal and welcoming of cultural diversity. We have been pioneers, engineers, and our artists and scientists contribute to the greater good world over. I even love that no other country has an organisation quite like the National Trust – we have a sense of history, and we endeavour to honour it. And I even love some aspects of our political history – we have been capable of admirable campaigning, against slavery and extremism worldwide. At the same time, we’re long enough in the tooth to have developed healthy levels of cynicism and a strong sense of irony.
But I’m starting to feel a bit embarrassed about who we have become – and who we let govern us. I’m starting to agree with Russell Brand; maybe many of us really are now effectively disenfranchised. There is no political party that I trust to actually take care of us. I’m middle class, self-employed, a home-owner, degree educated – all the things that would naturally make me about as typical a British citizen as you can get, a true representative of Middle England. I felt that for the sake of balance, the significant political changes we saw in both 1997 and 2010 were, both, moves in the right direction. Any one party stays too long and they appear to become complacent. But now, no-one in Westminster is speaking my language, and I am shocked that they are, collectively, letting such appalling inequalities continue into the next generation and beyond. I’m shocked that their ideas about how to fix things are so way, way off the mark. I’m shocked that they appear to care so little.
I started my day listening to Michael Wilshaw’s ridiculous pronouncements about how much early years settings are getting wrong, how much they are failing to prepare our youngest children for school and for life. The man made my blood boil – so much ignorance, so much ideological nuance, so little attention to the research and the evidence. He has no mandate to say the things he says. He is a civil servant charged with delivering regulation as laid down by statute – no more, no less. No-one voted for him, no-one gave him a green light to start peddling his agenda. I watched my twitter feed light up with indignation at his comments. Clear thinking people, people who have dedicated their working lives to understanding how best to promote children’s welfare and developmental progress, were shouting loudly from every corner of the country. Here is one such incredibly passionate and dignified response to it all. In the year or so since I started to earn a living from my writing about parenting and education I have seen a hundred days such as today. And I couldn’t quite help but lose my usual optimism. They keep on spitting all this nonsensical bile out, and we keep fighting back – but to what end? - came the thought.
If your assessment of this post is ‘bleak’ – I can’t argue. There is a pattern to my writing that usually ends with an upward swing. My automatic inclination is to pull a nugget of hope or possibility out from pretty much any on-the-surface negative situation. I am, by nature, a resolutely half-full glass. But today? Well, the glass is drained dry and the tap isn’t working.
